Understanding the membership cycle
Many older, legacy member management systems tightly tie together the allocation of credits with the corresponding payment. For many modern facilities, this presents limitations and inflexibility in the way they charge for memberships, often leading to situations where members cannot book future sessions because they’ve not yet paid for the credits covering that period.
GymOS separates the payment and credit allocation scheduled within memberships. This, combined with the concept of our “grace credits”, provides an enormous level of flexibility for facility owners.
For those who are accustomed to working with traditional systems, the GymOS approach may seem disorienting at first. However, once understood, the process makes a great deal of sense and is straightforward.
The separation of the credit allocation and payment schedules
One of the most important concepts to grasp when configuring GymOS is that (whilst related), within a given membership, the credit allocation and payment schedules are two separate things. It is this separation that allows you to easily sell, for example, monthly rolling memberships with payment taken every 2 weeks, every month, every quarter, or every year.
Whilst, for many facilities, the credit and payment schedule for a membership might coincide, this is not always the case. Invariably, it is this aspect that causes some facility owners initial confusion.
Grace Credits
“Grace Credits” are used by GymOS to address the common issue in many membership solutions, where members cannot book into a forthcoming period because the credits haven’t yet been paid for (and thus, allocated).
By default, GymOS will issue Grace Credits for the period beyond the current one. So, typically, a member will have a set of “paid for” credits available and valid for the current period, and a set of “grace credits” available and valid for the next period. At each recurring credit issue point, existing grace credits are transferred to be “paid for” credits, and a new set of “grace credits” is issued for the next period.
Grace credits are optional and can be turned off at the time of allocating a membership to a member. In this instance, grace credits are not issued, and the member may experience the familiar frustration of not being able to book into future periods.
We do not recommend turning off grace credits, as this will likely result in frustration for both you and your members.
The smart approach to issuing credits
If you, like many gyms, promote your memberships on an “x sessions per week” basis, we strongly encourage you to issue your credits on a 28-day cycle (4 weeks). This is because calendar months have different lengths, and issuing your credits monthly will result in members having too many credits in short months (E.g. February) and potentially too few credits in 5-week months.
A common rolling monthly membership scenario
Most facilities operate their memberships on a monthly rolling basis.
Typically, in this instance, you would configure the credits thus:
This informs GymOS that the credit allocation period is 28 days (period length x period) and that, for this membership, it is repeated 13 times (i.e., 13 x 28 days = 364 days = 1 year). If the membership is ongoing, the “auto-renew” box is ticked further down the page.
The credits allocated every “period” are defined on the “deliverables tab” of the membership.
The payment schedule for a typical monthly payment might be:
The above dictates that the member is charged every 1 month on the monthly anniversary of the membership commencement date (or as close as possible). So, a member starting their membership on the 15th would be charged on the 15th of every month.
Dynamic versus fixed date charging
Many gyms get stuck in the mindset that they need to charge their members on the 1st of each month. This is all fine and doable within GymOS, but it unnecessarily limits your options. By working with “monthly anniversary” timings, you give GymOS greater flexibility for dealing with scenarios such as membership pauses. If you fix your membership payment dates, you will need to calculate and implement charge changes yourself, manually.
A common mistake to avoid
Very often, new clients will configure their credits to be valid until “end of the month”. This works for your members who start on the 1st and have their credits issued monthly.
However, it doesn’t work in our recommended approach of issuing credits on a dynamic cycle of, say, 28 days. Because credits are issued on any day of the month, if you set them to expire at the end of the calendar month, they will have the incorrect duration. Instead, put your credit validity period to match the issue period (E.g., 28 days). This means that one set of credits expires as the next one starts. You could add a few grace days (E.g, 31 days) if you wish to give a slight overlap.
Payment for period-1 of a membership
The first charge for a given membership will typically be a pro-rated payment, calculated for the period between the membership start date and the next payment date.
For example, if you always take payment on the 1st of the month and someone starts their membership on the 15th, the first period’s payment would be roughly 50% of the membership fee. Their next payment, on the 1st, would then be the full payment.
The exception to this is when you have your membership payment set as “monthly anniversary”. In that case, the first and recurring membership fees will both be the full month’s membership fee.
The most common type of membership
Most members of training facilities are looking for a monthly rolling membership, with monthly credit allocation.
As a facility owner, it makes no difference to you whether GymOS allocates credits on the 1st, 5th or 27th of the month – they are all valid for the same duration, so it makes no practical difference. All members have the same allocation across the same period, regardless of the point at which they are allocated.
A typical membership would have credits allocated every 28 days, with payment taken on the monthly anniversary, and credits set to expire 28 days after allocation. This is easily understandable and logical for members. They receive their credits every 4 weeks and pay their monthly dues on the anniversary of their sign-up. Nice and easy.
Designed to fit your business
The GymOS membership system has been designed to allow you, within reason, to run your business and manage memberships as you wish.
It also makes it incredibly easy to set up different payment plans for different memberships, without needing to set up a stack of different memberships (all pretty much the same).
Furthermore, upon allocating a membership to a member, you can override pricing, etc. This is particularly handy if you have preferential rates for long-term members, etc. Another benefit is that it provides an alternative technique for charging one member of the family for the entire family’s memberships (E.g., Mum pays for herself and her two kids; the kids pay nothing. Net result: Mum pays for herself and the kids).
The initial setup of memberships and credits is, without doubt, the trickiest point of the system setup. The good news is that, once you have your head around it, it’s really not that complex. Also, for many facilities, once they’re set up, they rarely need to be changed – they “just work!”